Searching for "Gramma"!

 First of all, readers, whoever you are, I want you to know that my weekend "funk" is over---I think a lot had to do with the overwhelming torpor the medication that I get every three weeks caused. And on Monday I had three tutoring sessions---the give and take with the students was very lively---created an almost "jaunty" feeling for me. But who is "Gramma"?

Just read an article in The City about the other side of Mamdami's rent freeze proposal--a fair statement that revealed that many landlords in the city who own rest stabilized apartments, really need some sort of rent increase to keep their buildings going. I understand that--it is an interesting dilemma for the new administration---athough housing advocates feel the rent freeze is justified. Somehow I feel that there is enough of an analytical vision in (hopefully) the Mamdani administration to create a solution that helps both sides. But the building that the article mentioned as an example of an aparatment building that might go under if a rent freeze takes place was on Creston Avenue in the Bronx--a few steps from where, when I was a child, I would visit my grandmother (my father's mother0 and where I felt very safe. My father was the youngest of a large Jewish family that had emigrated from Poland around 1920, when he was 12. A few times a year, the whole family would visit there--I remember an incredible variety of aunts, uncles and their cousins---all with different economic visions of life which, I, around 7 or 8 would try to absorb. But what I also remember vividly was the "safety' that the neighborhood around the building seemed to offer. Placid, relaxed---and all white---overwhelmingly Jewish. Looking back on that time----in my head a kind of "paradise on earth'. I understand that the neighborhood has "changed" that its inhabitants are mostly black and Hispanic working class citizens of the city---that they are entitled to good services, and that they probably are "good people".---yet I felt so safe there as a child--but of course it had to change--the destiny of my generation was to "move forward"---super achieve. 

Creston Avneue---two stories---two different kinds of people--when I take the 4 train to Bronx Science for the few alumni events during the year, I stand by the door windows---looking out---imagining the world that "was'.  Trying hard to connect the images in my mind of the two worlds.